A Prisoner of War, but Not a Hero

By ALEX BERENSON

June 3, 2014

LEAVE no soldier behind.

The four words are honored at every rank in the American military. Soldiers willingly, sometimes foolishly, risk their own lives to keep their comrades out of enemy hands.

So the White House expected that the release of Bowe Robert Bergdahl, a 28-year-old taken prisoner in Afghanistan nearly five years ago, would bring cheers. President Obama personally publicized the release, speaking in the Rose Garden on Saturday alongside Sergeant Bergdahl’s parents. (A private when captured, he was promoted in captivity.)

Instead, many of his fellow soldiers are outraged. When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the news to troops at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, he was met with silence. Online, soldiers and veterans — including some from Sergeant Bergdahl’s own platoon — have filled Facebook pages to condemn the decision to free five Taliban commanders from the Guantánamo Bay prison in exchange for him.

The Obama administration’s decision to talk with the Taliban to secure Sergeant Bergdahl’s release is not what has driven that anger. The American pledge not to negotiate with terrorists has been honored more in the breach than the observance from the moment President Ronald Reagan made it. And the Taliban already play a major role in Afghan politics. The United States will be dealing with them for the foreseeable future, like it or not.

No, the military fury stems from the troubling circumstances of Sergeant Bergdahl’s capture — and the fact that several American soldiers from units in the province where he disappeared were killed in the months that followed his disappearance. Sergeant Bergdahl’s critics say some of those deaths were related to the search for him, though the Pentagon says those charges are unsubstantiated.

Michael Hastings, an investigative reporter who died last year, examined Sergeant Bergdahl’s disappearance in a lengthy 2012 Rolling Stone piece whose accuracy has not been questioned. Drawing on emails that Sergeant Bergdahl sent to his family and interviews with his fellow soldiers, Mr. Hastings reported that he had despised serving in Afghanistan almost from the moment he arrived in the spring of 2009. By Mr. Hastings’s account, Sergeant Bergdahl’s unit was undisciplined, undermanned and poorly led. Sergeant Bergdahl didn’t understand why he was there.

Following a long firefight that May, Sergeant Bergdahl’s anger worsened. On June 27, he wrote a final email to his family, according to Mr. Hastings. It included these words: “I am sorry for everything. The horror that is america is disgusting.” Three days later, he left his rifle and night-vision goggles and walked off his base. The decision was so reckless as to verge on suicidal. Not surprisingly, the Taliban captured him in less than two days.

Sergeant Bergdahl may have broken any number of military laws. Under Article 85 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a soldier commits desertion if he “quits his unit, organization, or place of duty with intent to avoid hazardous duty or shirk important service.” Desertion during wartime is punishable “by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.”

Of course, no military court has found him guilty of any crime. But there’s no doubt that Sergeant Bergdahl’s disappearance caused terrible trouble. American forces across eastern Afghanistan suspended other operations and spent weeks searching for him.

Meanwhile, he had the opportunity to repent his decision to leave the base. He spent almost five years in the less than welcoming hands of the Taliban, who made propaganda videos with him as an unwilling star.

As a reporter, I embedded for modest stints with American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. When I’m asked about those experiences, I always say — and mean — that we civilians don’t deserve the soldiers we have. In this case, perhaps, the reverse was true. The White House worked tirelessly to free Sergeant Bergdahl, and did not let the murk around his disappearance stop its decision to trade Taliban detainees for him. I’m no soldier, but that decision seems right to me. No man, or woman, left behind.

But now that this man is on his way home, what to do with him? The White House clearly erred by pretending that Sergeant Bergdahl was an ordinary prisoner of war and that his return would be cause for unalloyed celebration. It should have brought him home as quietly as possible, with no fanfare. Now I don’t see how the Pentagon can avoid re-examining what happened on June 30, 2009.

If Sergeant Bergdahl is proved mentally competent to stand trial, maybe he deserves a few years in Leavenworth to reflect on his dereliction of duty. Ultimately, his peers in a military court must answer that question.

But the anger and confusion that his release has generated seems somehow fitting, a messy and inconclusive end to a war that went on far too long without a clear purpose after the rout of Al Qaeda. Bowe Bergdahl is going home. So are the Taliban.

Alex Berenson, a former reporter for The New York Times, is the author of the John Wells series of spy novels, the most recent of which is “The Counterfeit Agent.”